How to avoid constantly starting paragraphs with "The character did this" "The character did that"?

This seems to be an increasingly common problem and my belief is that it results from the writer consciously or unconsciously seeing the movie in his head and trying to transfer it to the page. Thus they give what are essentially stage directions at every verse end.

To break this habit, you have to remember that a novel is not a movie. A movie is, in some sense at least, a complete experience. The viewer's major senses are saturated with sound and visual action. There is certainly some room for the viewer to fill in the gaps, but not nearly so much as there is in a novel. A novel works far more by suggestion than by saturation. Providing all the details of a scene that a movie can pack into a single shot would be tedious and exhausting in a novel where the reader cannot take them all in at a glance but must read every detail one at a time and gradually integrate them into a complete picture.

Novelists seldom go into that much detail, and when they do, it is done as scene setting, and the novel then relies on the reader's memory while the action unfolds in front of the scene that has been painted. (Indeed, the extent to which a novel relies on memory is perhaps the greatest thing that sets prose storytelling apart from movie storytelling.)

The big difference between movie and page is that a movie has both a background and a foreground. A novel only has a foreground. A movie can draw the reader's attention to one element of a complex scene. A novel calls the reader's attention to each word in turn. When you visualize a scene, you visualize background details, but if you describe them, they become foreground, not background, which scatters the focus that the reader should have in a scene. This is why most dialogue in novels is just dialogue, with no actions described at all. It keeps the focus on the dialogue.

But for the most part, the novelist never does rely on painting a complete scene. Instead, they rely on the use of telling details to draw images from the reader's own mind, or they dispense with the need to paint a scene at all and focus on other aspects of the human experience, dispensing with a painted backdrop altogether.

I don't want to go as far as some would and encourage you to drop descriptions altogether. That is going too far and description is an essential part of the novel. But description is done largely through suggestion and relies hugely on memory (which is why it is hard to lift a novel out of its cultural context). But resist the urge to describe every motion, to act out the scene in your head. The novel is not the right media for that kind of storytelling. Novels are, to a much greater extent than movies, a medium of ideas rather than raw experience and your focus should be on the ideas that your characters are discussing and acting upon, rather than on the details of their movements or the backdrop they move against.

posted about 7 years ago

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Mark Baker‭

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Honestly, I see nothing wrong with your example. It reads quite naturally to me, and feels much less intrusive than some of the alternatives suggested in other answers here.

It's possible, I suppose, that a longer excerpt written in the same style might eventually start to feel repetitive. From just the sample, though, I'm not getting that feeling. All it's doing (at least now that you've drawn my attention to it) is showing Colin as someone who tends to signal his feelings non-verbally. Which, you know, people often do. If all your characters are doing that all the time, that might be an issue, but if it's just some characters some of the time, I wouldn't worry too much.

It might be that you're simply looking at your own writing too closely, and failing to see the forest for the trees. One useful trick to return to (or at least approximate) the "new reader perspective" is simply to set your text aside for a while — a day, a week, a month, whatever works for you — and work on something else in the mean time. Once your brain has had time to forget the details of the text, pick it up and re-read it as if you were seeing it for the first time. You may find that the little things that seemed awkward or annoying before now read just fine, while you may also be able to spot other issues that you were previously blind to.

All that said, if you still find the repeated non-verbal reactions during dialogue distracting, you should consider just leaving them out. Don't replace them with anything — just drop them entirely if they're not doing anything for you.

For example, your paragraph:

Colin nodded. "You're a good man, Electron," he said. "I think we're gonna get along just fine. It's a pleasure to have you in my city."

could simply become:

"You're a good man, Electron," Colin said. "I think we're gonna get along just fine. It's a pleasure to have you in my city."

We don't really need to know that Colin nodded his head, since his spoken dialogue is already doing a decent job of conveying his implicit agreement. A bit terse, maybe, but perfectly readable.

Mind you, I'm not convinced that removing this particular nod is really an improvement, since having it there feels just fine to me. But if you wanted to drop it, you could. You certainly don't need to replace it with any kind of extra gerund or adverb or "said bookism", as some have suggested here. Not that there's anything wrong with those, either, when used where they belong. But they're not needed here, and would IMO be much more of a distraction than a simple "Colin nodded."

posted about 7 years ago

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Ilmari Karonen‭

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You can skip the "Colin smiled." line, and just imply it, using the tag.

"I'm sure the other patients will appreciate that as well," Colin said, pleased. "You been to the children's ward yet?"

Some of these actions can be left off, or expanded, or put into the dialogue.

Instead of Colin nodded (in agreement to Electron's "you know?") Colin could say

"There's that! xxxx

"I get that. xxx

"Makes sense! xxx

or some character-appropriate verbal acknowledgement.

I think the problem is you are moving the camera too much, or directing focus too much. In a two person conversation, tag lines are only needed every three or four lines, to help the reader keep track, but if Electron says something, then another person talks, it has to be Colin. If Colin says something, only Electron would reply.

You don't have to invent an action to inform the reader who is speaking; trust your reader to be imagining the scene. If you just want to break the text of their speech, just "Colin said." in the middle of it is enough.

If you want to slow down the "block of text", try to watch this scene in your head without the speech. If it is a still picture, perhaps you can find some way of making them have bodily movements, thoughts, perception problems (glare, lights, hearing), distractions, etc.

Even in this kind of conversation, you can add some conflict, even if it is minor: Colin is putting on his politician's face while hiding pain from stitches, and is wishing that this nice guy Electron would leave already, so he could stop making the effort. Or so he could call again for the damn water he asked for thirty minutes ago, or so he doesn't miss the entire first half of the football game.

posted about 7 years ago

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Amadeus‭

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